THE SANDWICH

THE SANDWICH

For a while there I was a member of the Sandwich generation, where I had to deal with ailing parents and young children; now I guess I am the bottom piece of bread in the sandwich and my grandchildren the top slice? I know people whose parents are still alive (and ailing) and who have grandchildren with whom they are actively involved- is this a Reuben sandwich generation then?

My mother was 65 when she died, and I was 30, a mother of 4 little children who don’t remember her at all. As much as I miss my parents, as much as my mother passed away too young, both of us too young, I also am comforted in knowing that they are in a better place. At least they were spared the nightmare of dementia, and by ‘they were spared’ I mean ‘I was spared’ too. My father would have been 100 this year, and couldn’t manage a cordless household phone when he passed away age 86; just couldn’t work out how to hold it when his younger cousin called from Israel to speak to him, essentially to say goodbye. What would he have made of Skype? What would my mother have made of iPhones? Suddenly I feel so old myself; I remember when phones were made of black Bakelite and had a fabric covered wire connecting the handpiece to the main bit with the heavy rotary dial. Why am I thinking of phones so much? Communication?

Yesterday a colleague debriefed to me at work. A busy doctor, mother of 3 young kids, only surviving child since her brother was killed in a car crash 4 years ago, her father is dying of a rare form of cancer and her mother is angry about it. She has to deal with the medical side of the equation, as if the emotional stuff wasn’t enough. She feels he was mismanaged by his GP and one of the specialists, and she is probably right. I felt the same way about how my mother was managed by her GP, who also never once visited once it was clear she was terminally ill; yet my parents still respected him.

My colleague has to explain the stuff they are doing to her father, to her mother. She has to do this, and work, and care for and fret about her 3 little kids. She is in the Sandwich. She must have a supportive husband who is preparing the children’s dinner and bathing them because by the time she gets home they will be in bed.

I have nothing to say to her, no words of comfort, except maybe ‘this, too, will pass’, that all-purpose mantra for good times as well as bad. Life goes on. It’s a great cycle. I don’t think she is religious so there’s nothing to say about G-d moving in mysterious ways. Same with ‘he is going to a better place’.

But it does get better; it’s just that it will get a lot worse before it gets better.

Wordless hug. Nothing else.